Save the Date!

Friends of the Library Gala

January 27, 2007

Catalog Brings NewVisibility to Drew'sSpecial Collections

By Lessie Culmer-Nier,Head of Cataloging

Libraries and archives worldwide are concerned about making their "hidden" collections visible and available for scholarly use. To promote the richness of the University's treasures, the Library has begun creating individual catalog records for collections of material such as the archival collections of major Drew figures George Kelsey, Thomas H. Kean, and the Gibbons family.

Each record, accessible from the Library's Web-based catalog, has abundant keyword descriptors and name and subject headings, in addition to a link to an electronic finding aid. Recognizing the success of this new access, the Library is exploring the application of collection-level cataloging beyond archival papers and collections to other resources such as subject collections of nineteenth century pamphlets.

PresidentChallenges UniversityLibrary to Plan for the Library of the Future

President Weisbuch has asked the University Library to step back from its list of pressing needs and think about "the library of the future." Too often, he maintains, planning responds to known needs and is not sufficiently informed by bold, visionary thinking. Weisbuch reflects:

Our collections remind us of some of the permanent values of libraries for conserving human history and the achievements of civilization.

Given continuity and change, how do we want to think of the Library our children will inherit? And since the Library is the heart of the University, what we decide about that has great import for the shape of the University more generally.

To that end, a strategic process has begun that will respond to such questions as:

How is the mission of the academic library changing?

How should it change over the next decade?

Should anything remain the same?

How could the next comprehensive campaign of the University best benefit the Library?

The Library has launched a series of explorations with its natural con-versation partners-the University Library Committee, University Technology, and regional and national library consortia. Several campus-wide events in the early fall will invite the community to discuss and debate various visions of the future. A final report is expected in early November.

Reflections from the community are coveted and may be sent to Andrew Scrimgeour, Director of the Library.

The Director's Corner:Bringing Cartoons to Light

The Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammed set off riots in many parts of the world, as Muslim fundamentalists protested the negative portrayals of the Prophet. Western media, fearful that displaying the cartoons would bring reprisals to their doorstep, resorted to verbal description in their coverage of the story. Only the Philadelphia Daily News, it appears, chose to print one of the images. Once again, the public turned to the Internet as the assured place for the uncensored and found the offending caricatures.

Seventeen years ago the Ayatollah Khomeini called for the execution of Salmon Rushdie, the author of Satanic Verses, a novel that treated the Muslim faith with playful skepticism. A $5 million bounty on Rushdie's head intensified the drama, as he went into hiding. American authors were silent for a week, then public readings of the novel began and the bookstore chains revoked their embargo on the novel and began to stock their shelves. Norman Mailer declared "Certain acts count for more than others in the defense of freedom, and the willingness to embrace an idea at perilous cost to our inner calm may be at the center of what the Western world is all about."(1) The New York Times commented that the incident "marked the first time in living memory that a threat against a writer caused trembling in the United States ." (2)

Today, however, the specter of death for any hint of disrespect to Islam is no longer a remote possibility. The United States lives in a chastened, post-9/11 world; discretion is declared to be the better part of valor. Consequently, the intrepid Danish cartoonists have few supporters.

These events have been disquieting for me and have stirred uncomfortable questions. Should the Drew Library display the cartoons? Is it possible to set them in a thoughtful context that invites vigorous campus debate on such pressing issues as inter-cultural sensitivities, freedom of the press, censorship, weapons of mass dissemination, humor in the history of world religions, and the relative power of words and images?

After all, the Drew Library seems uniquely able to aid such discussions. It is home to an internationally known collection on political art - the Chesler Collection of Cartoon Art and Graphic Satire (3), over 4,000 volumes strong. And we are home to a derisive cartoon for which we will certainly become well known in the near future. It was discovered among the Gibbons Papers, dating to around 1802, and lewdly portrays Thomas Jefferson's slave mistress, Sally, and their alleged son, Tom. (4)

Historically, libraries have taken pride in granting political asylum to all manner of controversial material, but we have been less imaginative in drumming up business for the use of these special collections. Increasingly, our Web sites are offering visual tours of some of these special collections and archives, augmenting the exhibits that are part of the outreach of any thoughtful library. Can we be bolder? Perhaps it is time for the Drew Library to propose special inter-disciplinary courses that would regularly invite students to delve into these unique resources. Would not a course on graphic political satire be timely and a worthy test case? An exhibit in the lobby of the Library documenting the progress of the course, a joint project of the students and faculty in the class, could be the focal point for campus comment and debate. Opportunities like these would surely arrest the attention of students and generate discussion beyond the classroom.

In so doing, the Library would be following the lead of Italian sculptor Donatello, who liberated the statue from the restricted niches of medieval architecture and revolutionized sculpture. (5) The Library would be liberating its special collections from the shadows of the stacks for the light of public study, discussion, and debate.

Richard Bernstein, "After a Pause, Writers Stood up for Rushdie and Themselves," New York Times (February 26, 1989), 24.

The collection is not yet fully processed.

Gibbons Collection, Special Collections, Drew University Library. See also Jefferson Vindicated: Fallacies, Omissions, and Contradictions in the Hemings Genealogical Search by Cynthia H. Burton (2005), 98.

Camilla Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn (Vintage Books, 2005), 4.

High Impact Biology and Biochem Journals at Drew

By Cathy Ryan,Reference Librarian

How do the science journal holdings of the Drew Library stand up to the latest list of "Hottest Journals" cited in Science Watch? A comparison shows that Drew offers full text access to all of the top ten biology and biochemistry journals in terms of citation impact. For a given journal and time period, citation impact is the ratio of total citations received to total citable articles.

The journals, listed in descending citation impact order for the time period January 1999 to August 2004 include: Science, Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Structure, Nature Structural Biology (now Nature Structural and Molecular Biology ), PNAS-Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America,Systematic Biolo gy, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Molecular Endocrinology, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta Molecular and Cell Biology of Lipids (Prior to 1999, known as Biochimica et Biophysica Acta Lipids and Lipid Metabolism ). For a list of holdings formats, contact Cathy Ryan at 973-408-3483, or cryan@drew.edu.

In what follows, I use the topic of the liberal arts in an example that illustrates some progress we've made toward the Library goal of optimizing access to information resources. Then, to highlight a few of our current information offerings, I use as an example the topic of information literacy. Finally, I suggest how we might create an appropriate context within which to view the Library's progress toward the above goal .

Electronic and Print Resources

Suppose you want to learn more about the liberal arts. Perhaps you start by looking up the topic in Wikipedia, where you learn that there are, or used to be, only seven such arts. Eager to learn more, you consult a librarian, who suggests that a more appropriate encyclopedia might be the New Catholic Encyclopedia. Your curiosity now engaged, you study the article in that encyclopedia and find a reference to The Seven Liberal Arts, a Study in Mediaeval Culture, by Paul Abelson. You look up this book in the catalog, find it in the Library, and begin reading. In that book you come across a citation to H. Parker's article, "The Seven Liberal Arts" in The English Historical Review. You'd very much like to read the article, but because it is from the late nineteenth century, it might be difficult to find. Indeed, a quick search in the Library's catalog shows that although Drew has most volumes of this journal, our print holdings are missing the 1890 volume that contains Parker's article. However, the Library does have the 1890 volume in microfilm. We also have access to it electronically through JSTOR. Which would you prefer? ( Google Scholar also retrieves a link to this article - in JSTOR.)

Years ago, you might have spent hours trying to get a copy of the article. Today you can find one in minutes. A scholar of information organization has said that "[i]nstant electronic access to digital information is the single most distinguishing attribute of the information age." (3) Well, "instant" might be an overstatement, but only a slight one, given how quickly we can access certain paid-for and "free" resources via the Web.

Some Current Offerings

What other wonders await you as you delve into your next topic, supported by the electronic resources that the Library provides on your behalf?

Let's say, for instance, that you want to learn more about the topic of information literacy. (4) You can search the Library catalog for relevant books there. You also might search Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA), and if you do, you might find a citation to the article, " Information Literacy Program Assessment: One Small College Takes the Big Plunge."(5) Naturally, you'll want to learn whether you can get a copy of this article through the Library. How do you do this? Well, if the Library had link-resolving software(6) in place, you would be able to see while viewing the article's citation whether or not you had access to the full text. But since Drew does not have that kind of software, you can instead go to the A-Z list of electronic journals and search on the title of the journal. If you do, you will see that we have access to the relevant journal for the year in question, and the full text of the article is available for downloading. (You might also look to see whether the author has posted the article on her Web site. Apparently she has not.) Of course you can always try Google, too.

But, after your initial explorations into the topics of liberal arts and information literacy, you may well be left with a double sense of discomfort. First, how can you construct your searches so that you efficiently determine what Drew and the wider Web can offer you? Second, rather than cherry-picking the appealing tidbits from the megabytes of information available, how might you actually synthesize the appropriate information and marshal your own ideas to create a coherent argument on, say, the role of information literacy in liberal arts education? I'll address the first question somewhat below. As for the second question, its topic is not new (7), though my sense is that it has only recently been the subject of focused discussions here at Drew.

Possibilities

So, how can we "optimize access to information resources through the effective and critical use of current technology"?

Well, you don't need a trained eye to see the clunkiness of our current approaches. Take the Web interface to our library catalog. At the moment we're essentially using an out-of-the-box version from the vendor, with just a few local customizations. The catalog's Web interface clearly could be improved. For some ideas on how, have a look at the Bergen County Cooperative Library System catalog, for instance. Or, better still, look at the new front end to the catalog at North Carolina State University for an idea of what hard work-and some add-on software-can do.

One step we would take is to try to follow the lead of these two libraries. Their innovations depend heavily on their use of Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs (8), which allow programmers to more deeply tap the capabilities of a given software program, e.g., the library catalog. APIs also play a key role in providing the newest kinds of services for library patrons. These new services are sometimes referred to by the buzzword, Library 2.0(9), which Wikipedia defines as:a model for library service that reflects a transition within the library world in the way that services are delivered to library users... especially evident in electronic offerings such as [public-catalog] configuration, online library services, and an increased flow of information from the user back to the library.
Also, why couldn't we search, in one fell swoop, across all the books and journals to which Drew provides access? Why do things have to be broken up into "searches for books," "searches for articles," and "searches for journal titles"? Again, software is available that can do this for libraries (11), though it's not software that we currently own. Short of having such software, though, I think we can reasonably hope to take advantage of at least one related capability in Google Scholar, namely, its ability to show a link to the Drew Library catalog for the book hits in its search results. Google Scholar also has the ability to post a link in its search results next to articles that Drew Library patrons have access to through the Library's subscriptions. Unfortunately, this capability is currently out of our reach, since it depends on having certain software that we don't currently have, namely, the link-resolving software referred to above.(12)

Complementing the desirability of some of the software capabilities described above are the far less glossy needs of the Library's back-office operations, which must be met in order to make decent electronic-resource offerings possible: e.g., ensuring accuracy in the coverage dates for all our electronic journal titles; managing vendors, subscriptions, and license agreements; ensuring that the A-Z list is both comprehensive and accurate; determining which e-journal titles should have catalog records, which shouldn't, and why; making access to our resources as simple as possible for off-campus users; etc. Some of this work is one-time remediation; some is ongoing; all of it needs to be done.

So it seems that the Library might be able to take advantage of some extremely useful new technologies, provided the financial wherewithal could be found. But even if it could be, what would an appropriate rationale for deploying these technologies? Progress towards the Library goal mentioned at the outset? I suggest that something more might be needed, something like a focused context that is clearly linked to the University's priority of providing excellence in liberal education. Otherwise, we run the risk of haphazardly accreting new technologies- searchable blogs here(13), folksonomies there(14), an ontology-in-process(15) on the horizon- because they happen to seem worthy and appropriate at the time.

A scholar of rhetoric once remarked that "[t]he life of any institution depends on the stories its members can bring themselves to tell each other." (16) Perhaps, then, one appropriate context for the potential deployment of new technologies might be any conversations the Drew community is having about the University's goals for information literacy in the liberal arts. The Library is happy to share its stories. And we're eager to hear yours.

Proustian Alchemy: Weeding the 200s

By Ernest Rubinstein, Ph.D.,Theological Librarian

Weeding is probably the lowest priority on any librarian's checklist of projects. The principles of it are too ambiguous, the process too dusty, and the results too subtle to be noticed by the average patron. But, on the other hand, the rules governing it are probably no more ambiguous than those guiding any other routine library activity; the dust that has surfaced no less promising than that which conceals any worthy antiquity; and-to capitalize on the botanical metaphor-the result a collection no less lovely than a garden whose worthiest blooms have been cleared of unintended, neighboring growths. Still, to weed a collection in a discipline as old and hoary as theology must give a librarian pause. I wanted a guiding spirit. And I found one, in Marcel Proust.

I have not read the recent spate of books that, in the manner of self-help digests, apply wisdom from Proust to our daily lives. I have not needed to, because I have arrived at that time of life when the reading of Proust, himself, comes naturally; I mean, that time of life when the years of it remaining are fewer than those preceding. I have been anticipating a long, slow read of Remembrance of Things Past. But only now has the time for it become ripe for me. A new translation from Penguin Books in attractively designed volumes helped get me started; and also, the hour-long commute to work I have each morning on the New Jersey Transit Dover line, out of Penn Station to Madison, which takes me past streams, flowers, fields, church steeples, and the rising sun, just the kinds of things that Proust likes to caress with his long, luxurious sentences.

Proust might seem to be an ineffectual guide to weeding. Doesn't his love of the past potentially sacralize every old book in the collection, to the point of immunity from the weeder's threatening hand? It would, except that, for Proust, it is less the past he loves than the living memories of it. Memory hovers between the concrete objects that first give rise to it, and the constructed, immaterial ideas that actually constitute it. Memory aetherealizes objects. By extension, Proust supplies the weeder with enough play between the corporeal, space-consuming being of a book and its aetherealized memory, to allow it to continue to be materially present in the collection-or not. The weeder must decide. But even a weeded book persists at least potentially in memory, perhaps by way of a friend or descendant of its author, a citation to it in some published or unpublished paper, a record for it that remains in a database attesting to some other library's possession of it. And if we are spiritually inclined, we take comfort from the thought that it persists in a divine Memory that never allows anything wholly to perish.

I approached the shelves armed with a cautionary memory from my own past. I was once a guest at Mount Saviour Monastery in Pine City, New York, a Benedictine monastery whose income derives in part from agriculture and crafts. The monks and I soon learned that I was not suited to milking cows. Perhaps I could weed the garden. Brother Peter, the Guest Master, delivered my instructions: to carefully distinguish the weeds from the pachysandra bed they disturbed, for he would be very unhappy if even a single strand of pachysandra was carelessly uprooted. Needless to say, I was soon transferred to the library, Brother Seraphim's domain, and the only place I properly belonged. But I had learned a valuable lesson in discernment, the most important quality to bring to weeding operations of any sort.

My weeding began in the 208s, on account of space needed there. According to the Dewey classification system, this number denotes "kinds of persons in Christianity." In our 208s, John Henry Newman occupies most of the shelves, and well he might, less for our theology school than for the many on campus who study and love the nineteenth century.

The books that gather around a subject already so specific as a single noteworthy individual are particularly resistant to weeding. Through the highly focused subject they share, and the many individual and original ways of approaching it, they are bound to each other in an organic whole. I withdrew nothing from this section but the duplicates. I eyed his neighbors more doubtfully, though. These were mostly festschriften to a wide range of scholars. The festschrift is a distinctly academic growth, with roots, as its name implies in German scholarship. Festschriften honor the life-long work of distinguished scholars, and typically

gather essays by appreciative colleagues and friends on the honoree's own interests. Festschriften point up the woven texture of an academic library collection, and the artifice of classification itself, because there will generally be books in other sections of the library either by or about the honorees. On the other hand, because the scholar honored is the point of the book, and not so much the content of the assembled essays, these volumes do ask for the weeder's closer scrutiny.

Still the arguments persist in their favor: Thanks to the American Theological Library Association (ATLA), they are very amply indexed. A patron might easily retrieve a citation to a festschrift essay in our much used ATLAS Index, known to some as Religion Index. Besides, the festschriften in the 208s are laden with memory for me. In my first professional job, I edited volumes of Religion Index Two, a now ceased print product of ATLA, whose point was precisely to index festschriften and other multi-author works, on the theory that their contents would otherwise escape notice. (ATLA still indexes festschriften but publishes the results in electronic form only.) I could not discard what ATLA has worked so hard to make accessible.

Then, as I read the shelves, I came across three volumes of the same noncommittal title, Essays and Reviews. These volumes hail from less self-promotional times, when a book might hide its light under a generic name. They are primary sources for the study of liberal thought in the 19 th century Church of England. Our own collection carries the memory of the controversy these essays stirred, through the several other books we have that comment on them. But the three of them did not constitute a series. They were simply different editions of the same book. Such seeming duplication suggests candidates for weeding. But here, too, the volumes made their case to remain. Libraries do not routinely keep multiple editions of single titles, especially in the case of introductory texts that publishers frequently reissue. But we are more careful with significant, historical texts.

My own lesson in the importance a difference of edition can make relates to Henry James. Once, when I was researching references in novels to the composer Franz Schubert, I remembered that, in the first scene in Portrait of a Lady where the character Madame Merle appears, she is playing a piano piece by Schubert. But to my surprise, when I consulted the copy of the novel on my shelf, the piece was by Beethoven. Could I have misremembered?

It turns out that there are at least two editions of the novel, in one of which, at her introductory scene, Madame Merle plays Schubert, and in the other, Beethoven. This raised a wonder of admiration in me over the care Henry James gave to his characters, that he would consider the difference in impression Madame Merle might make on a reader whether it was Schubert or Beethoven she was playing when she first appears. The discovery reminded me of a lecture/performance I once attended that contrasted the style and mood of precisely these two composers, who are nonetheless so easily paired. And now, whenever I meet a Henry James aficionado, I ask if they know anything about the Beethoven/Schubert contrast across the editions of Portrait of a Lady, or are aware of any comment from Henry James that might illuminate the reasons behind his change of choice; but I have never been enlightened on this point, and the most it has taught me is to respect the potential significance of difference of edition.

Was there nothing, then, that I could discard from the 208s? Happily for our space needs, if the 208s did not oblige, the 203s did. In the Dewey system, 03 ending a whole number connotes encyclopedia. And there, in the 203s, were several shelves worth of older, religious encyclopedias that duplicate what we already have in reference. These books would not need to turn to memory, as duplicate copies of them would still have a concrete place in the reference collection. But as I approached the beginnings of the 220s, which holds introductions to the Bible from many decades past, I knew that I would discover scope for Proustian alchemy to work its magic, and convert a physical tome or two to a memory someone cherishes.

Student Research

University Archives Stores Tales of Ghosts, Protests, World Wars

By Cheryl Oestreicher,University Archives Associate
Students from all three schools at Drew University make up a large percentage of the patrons who utilize the University Archives, and their interests vary widely. Some look at student theses and dissertations either as models or as supplemental research for their own. Many students access other primary documents for their research. During the fall semester of 2005, topics of interest to the students included student protests and demonstrations, racial issues during the 1960s, how World Wars I and II affected Drew, the history of Graduate Studies at Drew as the Caspersen School marked its 50 th anniversary, the Miss Drew University Pageant, ghosts that inhabit campus, undergraduate student organizations, and the history of the undergraduate residence halls.
There are many collections that filled these requests, including: President's Office Records, Registrar's Records, the Acorn, yearbooks, the Drew University Bulletin, the Circuit Rider, People and Events, Faculty Biography, Buildings and Campus Features, College of Liberal Arts Records, Theological School Records, Graduate School Records, and The University in the Forest: The Story of Drew University.

The University Archives were established under the direction of former Library director Dr. Arthur Jones and Mrs. Rae Jones in the late 1970s, more than one hundred years after the founding of Drew Theological Seminary. For more information please visit the website at: http://depts.drew.edu/lib/archives/ or contact Cheryl Oestreicher at coestrei@drew.edu or 973-408-3532.

Library Professional News

Ernest Rubinstein, Theological Librarian, published "The Philosophical Spirit: from Plato to Nussbaum," in the February 24, 2006 issue of Commonweal magazine. His article is part of the cover feature, "Spirituality: What it Meant, What it Means." In addition, his review of the book, Saving the Forsaken: Religious Culture and the Rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe, by Pearl Oliner (Yale University Press, 2005 ) appears in the January 13, 2006 Commonweal.

Andrew D. Scrimgeour, Director, organized and moderated a special session at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in November that honored the late Robert Funk, a renowned biblical scholar, founder of the Jesus Seminar, and, early in his career, a professor at Drew.

Jennifer Woodruff Tait, Methodist Librarian, defended her doctoral dissertation, "Purifying the Poisoned Chalice: Grape Juice and Common Sense Realism in the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1860-1900," at Duke University , December 9, in the Graduate Program in Religion. She also presented "The Poisoned Chalice: The Transition from Wine to Grape Juice in the Lord's Supper," at the Greater New Jersey Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church Historical Society on October 29.

Bela Kornitzer Award

Nominations Due in October for Faculty and Alumni/ae Prizes

Drew faculty and alumni/ae are eligible for prizes of $1,000 in recognition of outstanding nonfiction books published in 2004 or 2005. Separate awards have been established to honor both faculty and alumni/ae authors. A faculty prize committee will select the award winners, to be announced at the Friends of the Library Gala, January 27, 2007 .

The Bela Kornitzer Award was established in 1992 by Alicia and George Karpati to honor Bela Kornitzer, Mrs. Karpati's brother, and to recognize his achievements as a journalist and author in Hungary and the United States .

Please send submissions, including book, letter of nomination, and reviews if available, by October 1, 2006 to:

All books will be added to the Faculty and Alumni/ae collections in the University Archives.

University Library Exhibits

Main Library

March 6- April 3, 2006Inventories of the Past, Intimations of the Future: The Archives of the Society of Biblical Literature. An exhibit celebrating the Society's 125 th anniversary. The SBL Archives are part of the Special Collections of the Drew University Library. Curated by Andrew D. Scrimgeour.

April 10- May 21, 2006New Beginnings: The History of Presidential Inaugur-ations at Drew University. University Archives exhibit, curated by Cheryl Oestreicher; coincides with the inauguration of President Robert Weisbuch, April 28, 2006 .

June 1-30, 2006Women of the Morris County Park Commission. This traveling exhibit documents the historical roles of four influential women whose legacies are now enjoyed throughout the Morris County Park System.